Any person with no steady job and no children naturally finds time for
a sizable amount of utterly idle speculation. For instance, me - I've
developed a theory about crows. It goes like this:

Crows are bored. They suffer from being too
intelligent for their station in life. Respectable evolutionary success
is simply not, for these brainy and complex birds, enough. They are
dissatisfied with the narrow goals and horizons of that tired old
Darwinian struggle. On the lookout for a new challenge. See them there,
lined up conspiratorially along a fence rail or a high wire, shoulder
to shoulder, alert, self-contained, missing nothing.
Feeling...discreetly thwarted. Waiting, like an ambitious understudy,
for their break. Dolphins and whales and chimpanzees get all the
fawning publicity, great fuss made over their near-human intelligence.
But don't be fooled. Crows are not stupid. Far from it. They are merely
underachievers. They are bored.

Most likely it runs in their genes, along
with the black plumage and the talent for vocal mimicry. Crows belong
to a remarkable family of birds known as the Corvidae, also including
ravens, magpies, jackdaws, and jays, and the case file on this entire
clan is so full of prodigious and quirky behavior that it cries out for
interpretation not by an ornithologist but a psychiatrist. Or, failing
that, some ignoramus with a supple theory. Computerized ecologists can
give us those fancy equations depicting the whole course of a
creature's life history in terms of energy allotment to every physical
need, with variables for fertility and senility and hunger and motherly
love; but they haven't yet programmed in a variable for boredom. No
wonder the Corvidae dossier is still packed with unanswered questions.

At first glance, though, all is normal:
Crows and their corvid relatives seem to lead an exemplary birdlike
existence. The home life is stable and protective. Monogamy is the
rule, and most mated pairs stay together until death. Courtship is
elaborate, even rather tender, with the male doing a good bit of bowing
and dancing and jiving, not to mention supplying his intended with
food; eventually he offers the first scrap of nesting material as a sly
hint that they get on with it. While she incubates a clutch of four to
six eggs, he continues to furnish the groceries, and stands watch
nearby at night. Then for a month after hatching, both parents dote on
the young. Despite strenuous care, mortality among fledglings is
routinely high, sometimes as high as 70 percent, but all this crib
death is counterbalanced by the longevity of the adults.
Twenty-year-old crows are not unusual, and one raven in captivity
survived to age twenty-nine. Anyway, corvids show no inclination toward
breeding themselves up to huge numbers, filling the countryside with
their kind (like the late passenger pigeon, or an infesting variety of
insect) until conditions shift for the worse, and a vast population
collapses. Instead, crows and their relatives reproduce at roughly the
same stringent rate through periods of bounty or austerity, maintaining
levels of population that are modest but consistent, and which can be
supported throughout any foreseeable hard times. In this sense they are
astute pessimists. One consequence of such modesty of demographic
ambition is to leave them with excess time, and energy, not desperately
required for survival.

The other thing they possess in excess is
brainpower. They have the largest cerebral hemispheres, relative to
body size, of any avian family. On various intelligence tests - to
measure learning facility, clock-reading skills, and the ability to
count - they have made other birds look doltish. One British authority,
Sylvia Bruce Wilmore, pronounces them "quicker on the uptake" than
certain well-thought-of mammals like the cat and the monkey, and admits
that her own tamed crow so effectively dominated the other animals in
her household that this bird "would even pick up the spaniel's leash
and lead him around the garden!" Wilmore also adds cryptically:
"Scientists at the University of Mississippi have been successful in
getting the cooperation of crows." But she fails to make clear whether
that was as test subjects, or on a consultative basis.

From other crow experts come the same sort
of anecdote. Crows hiding food in all manner of unlikely spots and
relying on their uncanny memories, like adepts at the game of
Concentration, to find the caches again later. Crows using twenty-three
distinct forms of call to communicate various sorts of information to
each other. Crows in flight dropping clams and walnuts on highway
pavement, to break open the shells so the meats can be eaten. Then
there's the one about the hooded crow, a species whose range includes
Finland: "In this land Hoodies show great initiative during winter when
men fish through holes in the ice. Fishermen leave baited lines in the
water to catch fish and on their return they have found a Hoodie
pulling in the line with its bill, and walking away from the hole, then
putting down the line and walking back on it to stop it sliding, and
pulling it again until [the crow] catches the fish on the end of the
line." These birds are bright.

And probably - according to my theory -
they are too bright for their own good. You know the pattern. Time on
their hands. Under-employed and over-qualified. Large amounts of
potential just lying fallow. Peck up a little corn, knock back a few
grasshoppers, carry a beakful of dead rabbit home for the kids, then
fly over to sit on a fence rail with eight or ten cronies and watch
some poor farmer sweat like a sow at the wheel of his tractor. An easy
enough life, but is this it? Is this all?

If you don't believe me just take my word
for it: crows are bored.

And so there arise, as recorded in the case
file, these certain...no, symptoms is too strong. Call them, rather,
patterns of gratuitous behavior.

For example, they play a lot. Animal play
is a reasonably common phenomenon, at least among certain mammals,
especially in the young of those species. Play activities, by
definition, are any that serve no immediate biological function, and
which therefore do not directly improve the animal's prospects for
survival and reproduction. The corvids, according to expert testimony,
are irrepressibly playful. In fact, they show the most complex play
known in birds. Ravens play toss with themselves in the air, dropping
and catching again a small twig. They lie on their backs and juggle
objects (in one recorded case, a rubber ball) between beak and feet.
They jostle each other sociably in a version of "king of the mountain"
with no real territorial stakes. Crows are equally frivolous. They play
a brand of rugby, wherein one crow picks up a white pebble or a bit of
shell and flies from tree to tree, taking a friendly bashing from its
buddies until it drops the token. And they have a comedy/acrobatic
routine: allowing themselves to tip backward dizzily from a wire perch,
holding a loose grip so as to hang upside down, spreading out both
wings, then daringly letting go with one foot; finally, switching feet
to let go with the other. Such shameless hot-dogging is usually
performed for a small audience of other crows.

There is also an element of the practical
joker. Of the Indian house crow, Wilmore says: "...this crow has a
sense of humor, and revels in the discomfort caused by its playful
tweaking at the tails of other birds, and at the ears of sleeping cows
and dogs; it also pecks the toes of flying foxes as they hang sleeping
in their roosts." This crow is a laugh riot. Another of Wilmore's
favorite species amuses itself, she says, by "dropping down on sleeping
rabbits and rapping them over the skull or settling on drowsy cattle
and startling them." What we have here is actually a distinct
subcategory of playfulness known, where I come from at least, as
"cruisin' for a bruisin'". It has been clinically linked to boredom.

Further evidence: crows are known to
indulge in sunbathing. "When sunning at fairly high intensity," says
another British corvidist, "the bird usually positions itself sideways
on to the sun and erects its feathers, especially those on head, belly,
flanks and rump." So the truth is out: Under those sleek ebony
feathers, they are tan. And of course sunbathing (like ice-fishing,
come to think of it) constitutes prima facie proof of a state of
paralytic ennui.

But the final and most conclusive bit of
data comes from a monograph by K. E. L. Simmons published in the
Journal of Zoology, out of London. (Perhaps it's for deep reasons of
national character that the British lead the world in the study of
crows; in England, boredom has great cachet.) Simmons's paper is
curiously entitled "Anting and the Problem of Self-Stimulation." Anting
as used here is simply the verb (or to be more precise, participial)
form of the insect. In ornithological parlance, it means that a bird -
for reasons that remain mysterious - has taken to rubbing itself with
mouthfuls of squashed ants. Simmons writes: "True anting consists of
highly stereotyped movements whereby the birds apply ants to their
feathers or expose their plumage to the ants." Besides direct
application, done with the beak, there is also a variant called passive
anting: The bird intentionally squats on a disturbed anthill, allowing
(inviting) hundreds of ants to swarm over its body.

Altogether strange behavior, and especially
notorious for it are the corvids. Crows avidly rub their bodies with
squashed ants. They wallow amid busy ant colonies and let themselves
become acrawl. They revel in formication.

Why? One theory is that the formic acid
produced (as a defense chemical) by some ants is useful for
conditioning feathers and ridding the birds of external parasites. But
Simmons cites several other researchers who have independently reached
a different conclusion. One of these scientists declared that the
purpose of anting "is the stimulation and soothing of the body," and
that the general effect "is similar to that gained by humanity from the
use of external stimulants, soothing ointments, counter-irritants
(including formic acid) and perhaps also smoking." Another compared
anting to "the human habits of smoking and drug-taking" and maintained
that "it has no biological purpose but is indulged in for its own sake,
for the feeling of well-being and ecstasy it induces..."

You know the pattern. High intelligence,
large promise. Early success without great effort. Then a certain loss
of purposefulness. Manifestations of detachment and cruel humor.
Boredom. Finally the dangerous spiral into drug abuse.

But maybe it's not too late for the
corvids. Keep that in mind next time you run into a raven, or a magpie,
or a crow. Look the bird in the eye. Consider its frustrations. Try to
say something stimulating.